[outages] List comment

[Dan York]

On Jun 24, 2008, at 1:15 PM, Valdis.Kletnieks at vt.edu wrote:

> On Mon, 23 Jun 2008 22:44:22 EDT, Christian Blair said:
>
>> We don't need everyone's traceroute.
>> Hardly useful for others anyway unless they're your roommate.
>
> Actually, you have that backwards.
>
> If somebody posts a traceroute from a vastly different network  
> location,
> that tells you something.


I think the question really is - is this list designed for *reporting*  
and confirming outages?  Or is it designed for *diagnosing*/discussing/ 
troubleshooting outages?

If someone reports an outage, there is a degree of working with the  
reporter to confirm the outage that is necessary.  (i.e. "AIM isn't  
working for me" and others either confirming or saying that it does  
work for them.)  There have, though, been a couple of threads where  
this exchange has seemed to go on for a bit more than simple  
confirmation and dived more into troubleshooting.

The "reporting/confirming" type of list is a lower-traffic kind of  
list that's more announcement/alert-oriented.  The "diagnosing/ 
discussing" type of list could be a much higher-traffic list.    Both  
are worthwhile types of lists to have... but they also may attract  
different subscribers.

Based on a couple of comments I've seen here, I think some folks may  
have signed up thinking they were getting the first type of list and  
are less interested in the second type of list.  They may be more  
interested in "alerts" and not interested in "discussion".

I don't have a great solution to offer... I think the "community" here  
is probably too new to split into separate "alerts" and "discussion"  
lists.  I also personally don't care which type of list it is.  But I  
would suggest this difference in expectations is perhaps at the route  
of the original comment and others that have been on the list.

My 2 cents,
Dan

-- 
Dan York, CISSP, Director of Emerging Communication Technology
Office of the CTO    Voxeo Corporation     dyork at voxeo.com
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